It is hard to believe that Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 and the various distributions based on it (CentOS, Scientific Linux, and others) turned 10 years old last month!

With their 10th birthday on March 31st they've reached end-of-life, which means that maintenance will cease, and there will be no further updates to any software installed via vendor packages.

That means we can no longer make any security guarantees, and any future security or other vulnerabilities detected in packaged software or the core operating system will not be patched.  At that time, because these systems will be vulnerable to attacks, they will no longer meet UT minimum security requirements. In addition,  new hardware, software, and third party software updates may not work. In short, continuing to rely on version 5 is a disaster waiting to happen.

We strongly recommend anyone running version 5, or any previous versions, migrate to a newer version, such as 7, which is the current stable release version.  You MAY be able to continue running version 5 on campus for a while; but at some (not too distant) time, the UT Information Security Office (ISO) will start quarantining such machines as non-compliant.  If you need to keep running such machines, you should file a security exception request with the ISO.  Should a major security issue arise affecting version 5, the ISO may immediately quarantine machines vulnerable to that threat.

Please contact us at help@cns.utexas.edu if you have any questions or need help migrating to a newer version of your OS.

Written by Eric Rostetter, Senior System Administrator
Questions or comments? The best and easiest way to contact us is via the CNS Help Desk form.